25 Years Later, Voyager Mission Keeps Pushing the Space Envelope

A quarter-century after NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft departed Earth to visit outer planets, the historic mission is flying a race against time.

During the first 12 years after launch in 1977, the Voyagers chalked up a wealth of discoveries about four planets and 48 moons, including fast winds on Neptune, kinks in Saturn's rings and volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io. As scientists and engineers mark the mission's silver anniversary, they hope at least one Voyager will pass beyond the boundary of the Sun's influence before the onboard nuclear power supply wanes too low to tell us what's out there. Voyager 1 is now the most distant human-made object, about 85 times as far from the Sun as Earth is. Voyager 2 is now about 68 times the Sun-Earth distance.

"After 25 years, the spacecraft are still going strong," said Dr. Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist since 1972 and former director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Back in 1977, we had no way to know they would last so long. We were initially just on a four-year journey to Jupiter and Saturn."

The Voyager team at JPL still receives information almost daily from the durable spacecraft traveling beyond all the planets. The Voyagers are examining the far reaches of the solar wind, a gusty flow of particles hurled outward by the Sun. The eventual goal is to become the first spacecraft to taste interstellar space. Voyager 1, which launched on Sept. 5, 1977, flew past Jupiter and Saturn, then angled northward out of the plane of the planets' orbits. After Voyager 2 launched on Aug. 20, 1977, and completed its tour of Jupiter and Saturn, NASA extended the spacecraft's adventure with flybys of Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989.

"A radio signal traveling at the speed of light takes nearly 12 hours to travel between Voyager 1 and Earth. That raises operational concerns," said Ed Massey, Voyager's project manager at JPL. " If something went wrong on board, at least a full day would lapse before a signal revealing the problem could reach Earth and commands to fix it could be returned. It could be too late." So the project team tries to anticipate any emergencies and program the spacecraft's computers with advance instructions on how to react to them, he said.

Both spacecraft are studying the vast bubble the Sun inflates around itself by outward pressure of the solar wind. The bubble has a boundary, called the heliopause, where this outward pressure is counterbalanced by inward pressure of the interstellar wind in our neck of the galaxy. The interstellar wind outside that boundary is a flow of atoms and other particles blasted from explosions of dying stars. The location of the heliopause varies with the level of solar activity during the Sun's 22-year sunspot cycle and with changes in the interstellar wind, Stone said. Some scientists suggest that, on a much longer time scale, the interstellar wind may occasionally press the boundary far enough inward to sway Earth's climate.

Voyager 1 is rushing toward the heliopause at about 1.6 million kilometers (about one million miles) a day. Whether it gets there before about 2020, while it still has adequate electrical power, depends on how far away the heliopause is. Recent estimates are that, depending on that distance, it would take Voyager 1 between seven and 21 years to reach the heliopause.

Voyager 1 has already discovered that the outbound solar wind around it is slowing from effects of inbound interstellar particles leaking through the boundary. A much better prediction of the boundary's location will come when the spacecraft encounters the termination shock, the zone where the solar wind begins piling up against the heliopause. That encounter may come within the next three years, Stone estimates.

Whatever their future holds, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have already earned a prominent place in the history of exploration. Among their big surprises: Jupiter's moon Io has active volcanoes. Jupiter's atmosphere has dozens of huge storms. Saturn's rings have kinks and spoke-like features. The hazy atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan extends far above the surface. Miranda, a small moon of Uranus, has a jumble of old and new surfacing. Neptune has the fastest winds of any planet. Neptune's moon Triton has active geysers.

Long after they fall silent, the Voyager twins will keep speeding away from our solar system, each carrying an "interstellar outreach program" of recorded sounds and images from Earth, Massey said.

Further information about Voyager's past discoveries, current interstellar mission and messages from Earth is available at https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages Voyager for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C.